Reversible thermal cycling of DNA material for efficient cellulose hydrolysis

Enzymatic catalysis on the insoluble substrates commonly suffers from low enzyme stability, catalytic activity, and product recovery. Herein, a “thermal cycling method” of DNA material is proposed to tackle the challenges in enzymatic reaction, in which a thermal responsive self-assembled DNA material is designed for enzyme recovery. We demonstrate the remarkable advantages of this new method in cellulosic hydrolysis. The responsive DNA material has a solution to gel transition temperature at 13 °C. Therefore, the cellulase (CEL) can be on-demand switched between the mobile state, enabling high reactivity, and fixed state, facilitating CEL recovery and reuse. As a result, this system showed good catalytic activity and operational stability even at extremely high cellulose concentrations (100 mg/mL). We believe that this new strategy provides a general platform not only for enzymatic reactions but also for other bioderived reactions.